grafana-alert-shim

Note: This project is still under development and may only work in the specific environment of the author.

Background

Grafana 8 shipped with an awesome feature called unified alerting, which allow users to manage Prometheus-style alert rules through a straightforward web-ui. However, I encountered several problems when tried to adopt it in my environment:

Long-term metrics storage like Thanos may separate rules API and query API in different components, requiring an additional proxy to integrate with unified alerting as a single datasource.
Rule editing is only available for Cortex and Mimir, which is anti-unified since rule management now requires an additional system outside Grafana.

So I did some investigation and found it is easy to build a shim that mimic the alert rule management of Cortex/Mimir in other prometheus compatible systems. It works in my environment on Thanos. Hopefully it would also work on vanilla prometheus with minor modification.

Roadmap

Rule editing
- Support editing rules stored in k8s ConfigMap
- Support editing rules stored in PrometheusRule CRD
- (Help wanted) Support editing rules stored in the above forms, but with single source of truth at an VCS system like git (a.k.a. GitOPS)
Compatibility
- Test compatibility with vanilla Prometheus
- Test compatibility with VictoriaMetrics

Test in your environment

helm install test charts/shim \
  --set conf.querierBaseURL=<prom-query-endpoint> \
  --set conf.rulerBaseURL=<prom-rule-endpoint> \
  --set conf.configmap.namespace=<rule-configmap-ns> \
  --set conf.configmap.name=<rule-configmap-name> \
  --set conf.configmap.key=<rule-configmap-key>

For example, in my local development environment with a Thanos cluster, the command would be:

helm install --namespace monitoring test charts/shim \
  --set conf.querierBaseURL=http://thanos-query:9090 \
  --set conf.rulerBaseURL=http://thanos-rule:9091 \
  --set conf.configmap.namespace=monitoring \
  --set conf.configmap.name=thanos-rules \
  --set conf.configmap.key=rules.yaml

Use this shim as the datasource instead of thanos-query:

If all goes well you will see that this data source is now recognized as Cortex with Ruler API available:

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